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<Paper uid="W96-0411">
  <Title>Output String N G I N E</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="101" end_page="103" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 The Generation Interface
Language (GIL)
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Although the level of logical form is considered a good candidate for an interface to surface realization, practice shows that notational idosyncrasies can pose severe translation problems. TG/2 has an internal language, GIL, that corresponds to an extended predicate argument structure. GIL is the basis for the precondition test predicates and the selector functions of TGL. Any input to TG/2  is first translated into GIL before being processed. It is of considerable practical benefit to keep the rule basis as independent as possible from external conditions (such as changes to the output specification of the feeding system). null GIL is designed to be a target language suited for deep generation processes. Similar aims have been pursued with the development of the Sentence Plan Language (SPL) \[Kasper and V'hitney, 1989\] that is used in a variety of generation systems. Like SPL, GIL assumes only little grammatical information. GIL can represent DAG-like feature structures. Figure 2 contains a sample GIL expression. The example shows the major language elements:  cluding sentence type, time, a specification of which constituents to topicalize in a German declarative sentence, etc.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> * The predicate argument structure is reflected by corresponding features: ARGS contains a list of arguments.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> * Different sorts of free temporal and local adjuncts can be specified by corresponding features. In Figure 2, a temporal adjunct is represented under TIME-ADJ.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> * Arguments and, in part, adjuncts are specified for their role, for cardinality, for quantificational force (under C0NTENT.QFORCE), and further details such as name strings and natural gender.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> * Temporal adjuncts relate to some context (e.g. tomorrow) or are indexical (e.g. on Wednesday, February 7, 1996). All common combinations in German are covered. null</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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